The bodies began coming up from deep within the bowels of the
earth days after the first explosion at
the Centralia coal mine on March 25,
1947. Members of the Illinois prairie community of Centralia began hearing
about how an explosive charge meant to dislodge coal had ignited the unstable
coal dust permeating the air more than five hundred feet below ground at the
mine south of town in Wamac.
The wives of the miners whose fate was not yet known gathered at
the washhouse—the place where during the work week their husbands changed out
of their grimy, coal-streaked clothes at the end of their shifts. Avoiding the
rescue teams wearing their oxygen tanks and “other awkward paraphernalia of
disaster,” the women gravitated toward sitting beneath their loved ones’
clothing, settling in for the long wait to learn about their men’s fate.
Ambulances from Centralia and nearby towns idled their engines in
the cold night air, in an attempt by the men inside to keep warm as they waited
to be called upon to transport the deceased to the local Greyhound bus station,
which officials had converted into a temporary morgue. As a shiny limousine
drove away from the mine, taking with it one of the 111 men killed in the
disaster, a friend of the deceased, standing with others in the crowd,
remarked, “I bet it’s the only time he ever rode in a Cadillac.”
A year after the disaster, Harper’s magazine, in
its March 1948, reserved twenty-eight pages for a lengthy
examination of the Centralia mine blast. The story, written by freelance writer John Bartlow
Martin and titled “The Blast in
Centralia No. 5: A Mine Disaster No One Stopped,” praised by the Harper’s editors
as a “top-notch reporting job, to be compared . . . with John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima
Later reprinted in condensed form in Reader’s Digest,
a magazine with the largest paid circulation in the world, the article, written
by Martin in spite of threats of violence against him made by
mining officials, played a major role in bringing about the downfall of
Illinois’s Republican governor Dwight H. Green and electing Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson. The
federal government also stepped in and enacted a stricter safety code for
mines. Martin, however, offered his readers scant hope that a similar disaster
might not befall another mining community in the future. He remembered the
somber words of a young miner he met sipping a beer at a saloon in a
neighboring town. Martin reported the scene as follows:
‘I got a wife and one kid. It takes a lot of money to raise kids.
Where else could I make thirteen-o-five a day? The railroads pay eight, nine
dollars. And that’s all there is around here.’ At a table in a corner a couple
of old miners are arguing quietly, and behind the bar the lady bartender is
listening sympathetically to a lady customer whose husband is always crabbing
about what she cooks. The young miner says, ‘Sometimes I’d like to leave for
good. But where’d I go? I don’t know anything else. I don’t know what hell you
would call it. Well, it is life, in a way too. I just wish my life away, when I
go below I just wish it was tomorrow. Wish my life away. And I guess the others
are the same way, too.’
Only dimly aware of the disaster at first, Martin began his work
on the Centralia explosion following a suggestion from a Reader’s Digest editor he had previously
worked with, Paul Palmer, who promised him a large fee ($2,500) and offered to
pay his expenses (the Digest often
planted stories in other magazines with small budgets, making their own
arrangements with writers and then reprinting the article). Martin then
broached the idea to an editor at Harper’s, who
agreed to read the article when it was finished. “I set forth . . . thinking,
‘I’ve got a hell of a nerve, starting out single-handed, with nothing but my
typewriter, to overthrow the political machine of the governor of Illinois,’”
Martin recalled.
To uncover what had happened at the mine Martin, a former
newspaper reporter, began his research in Saint Louis, Missouri. The Saint Louis
Post-Dispatch had done yeoman work in exposing Green’s failure to
prevent the tragedy in spite of numerous warnings that dangerous conditions
existed at the mine, including a large accumulation of volatile coal dust. For
its efforts, the newspaper won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for public service. “The Post-Dispatch editors
gave me access to their files,” Martin said. “They were proud of what they had
done and well they should have been; they helped me, for they wanted the story
told.”
From Saint Louis, Martin traveled the approximately sixty miles
east to Centralia. The town of sixteen thousand looked nothing like Martin had
expected it to be. Instead of a “dismal [coal] company town” like ones in West
Virginia, Centralia had the look of a typical midwestern farming
community—“wide main street lined with low flat-faced stores, sprawling
railroad shops and the ungainly black coal-mine tipple on the edge of town.”
Martin began his work here by obtaining background information on the town
itself, talking to farmers, local businessmen, and housewives. Only then did he
begin interviewing those involved in the disaster, beginning with the miners
and the miners’ widows, because, as Martin noted, “they were the victims, the
aggrieved, and would want the world to know. I did not want the story to turn
into a debate among the powerful—Governor Green, and John L. Lewis of the UMWA
[United Mine Workers of America], and the coal company. I wanted it to be the
miners’ story, the story of helpless ordinary people.”
One of the first miners Martin talked to was William Rowekamp, who
as recording secretary of Local 52 of the UMWA had sent a two-page letter to
the governor pleading for his help that he typed while sitting at a cluttered
oak desk in his living room. While the letter praised Scanlan, calling him the
“best inspector that ever came to our mine,” it castigated his superiors at the
Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals for their inaction. “In fact,
Governor Green,” the letter stated, “this is a plea to you, to please save our
lives, to please make the department of mines and minerals enforce the laws at
the No. 5 mine of the Centralia Coal Co. . . . before we have an explosion like
just happened in Kentucky and West Virginia.” In addition to Rowekamp, the three
other men who signed the letter included Jake Schmidt, Local 52 president, and
Thomas Bush and Elmer Moss of the union’s mine committee; only Rowekamp
survived the massive Centralia underground explosion, described by one expert
as being like “a huge shotgun blast down a long corridor.”
Although taciturn by nature, Rowekamp soon began talking freely to
Martin, telling him that some miners were worried enough to even tell their
wives their fears about their safety. When he finished the interview, Martin
asked the miner, as he always did at the end of an interview, if he knew of
anyone else he should talk to, and Rowekamp gave him the name of other miners.
“For the next few days,” said Martin, “I went from one to another and I took to
hanging around the bare upstairs union hall and they became so used to seeing
me that they paid little heed, always what a reporter wants.” He soon learned
that the miners considered themselves a breed apart, superior to those who
worked on farms or factories. “The danger they were always in was part of the
fascination,” noted Martin. “They were fierce fighters for their rights. They
had a strong sense of being the underdog.” Martin, who grew up during the Great
Depression and saw his father lose his successful business, shared their
underdog mentality and that mind-set “remained a powerful force in my life and
my writing.”
To bring the disaster even more home to his readers, Martin talked
to the widow of one of the miners who died in the explosion, Mrs. Joe Bryant, a
big, forty-four-year-old woman who had borne eleven children; two had died in
infancy. Martin asked her to tell him everything about the day of the
explosion, and while she did, several small children played around her legs,
pulling on her dress in an effort to distract her. She shared with him a note
her husband had scrawled on a page torn from a time book while he was trapped
in a tunnel, waiting to die as the breathable air ran out. Bryant had written:
“Dear Wife fro Give [forgive] me Please all love you Be shure and don’t sign
any Paper see Vic Ostero [a warning against signing away her compensation
rights] My Dear wife good By.”
Funeral expenses had taken most of the compensation the widow had
received from the union and other sources, and she could only expect payments
of $44 a week for the next five years from the state’s industrial compensation
fund and Social Security. When Martin asked her who she blamed for the loss of
her husband, she said: “I don’t know nothin’ about the mine, I wouldn’t blame
no one, accidents happen, seems like it just has to be.”
Driving away from the Bryant home on a dusty road, Martin turned
his car for Springfield, the state capital, where he uncovered the second half
of his story—politics and government bureaucracy. Martin got a lucky break.
When he visited the offices of the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals,
he expected some foot dragging from its staff, but an employee on duty that day
said Martin could go through all the files, as they had already been published
during the various investigations into the Centralia explosion. “But it turned
out they hadn’t,” Martin noted. “I found a mountain of paper accumulated over
five years. Piled up, the evidence was devastating.”
Martin traced, almost hour by hour, the reports issued by Scanlan
finding that the mine was dangerously dusty and warning that such conditions
could lead to an explosion. Medill, the department’s director, had not seen
Scanlan’s first thirteen reports; they were handled by his deputy, who read
some, but not all, of the scathing reports. Form letters indicating the
department agreed with Scanlan’s findings were mailed to the Centralia mine
company’s Chicago office. “Not only did the company not comply with Scanlan’s
recommendations, it did not even bother to reply,” said Martin.
When federal mine inspections started in 1942, they found the same
violations and made the same recommendations as had Scanlan. “The company
ignored them too,” said Martin, who spent days in the department’s office
making notes on “scores of federal and state inspection reports,
correspondence, transcripts of the six hearings and investigations into the
Centralia disaster.” After interviewing Medill, whom he described as “a large
jovial man with a loud blustery voice,” at his home in Lake Springfield, Martin
returned to the Illinois capital, where he talked to legislators, union
officials, lobbyists, and coal operators. He tried, and failed, to interview
Governor Green and Lewis.
Martin was now ready to start writing his story, but resisted the
temptation to start. He had never forgotten the advice of a writer friend, W.
Adolphe Roberts, the author of numerous historical novels, who had told him,
“‘We always send our stories in too soon,’ before we’ve made them the best we can.”
Also, the story had become so “big and complex, jumbled up in my head, all
disorganized and out of order,” said Martin, that he had to take a few days off
to fish in Upper Michigan, “trying not to think about Centralia, letting it
marinate.” It worked; driving back to his home in suburban Chicago he began to
see the story unfold before him. “The principal elements were the town of
Centralia, the miners, their union, the mine operators, and state and federal
authorities,” he said. “The story’s impact would depend upon two things:
bringing the characters alive, and piling up the evidence of the history of the
disaster.”
Because he had such an abundance of research for his Centralia
article, Martin abandoned his old system of organizing his material on three-inch
by five-inch notecards. Instead, he went through his notes and documents, gave
each a code number, and then numbered the pages. When he came across an item he
wanted to use in the article, he typed it out, triple spaced, and keyed it to
code and page numbers. “I then cut up the typing line by line into slips of
paper,” said Martin. “I moved the slips around, arranging and rearranging them.”
When he had all the slips arranged to his satisfaction, he pasted
them together, resulting in a long scroll that he rolled up, placed on his
typing table, and consulted as he began writing, letting the scroll fall to the
floor as he worked. When he came to the end of the scroll, he had his rough
draft finished. Martin eventually abandoned this system when, years later, one
of his scrolls measured more than 150 feet long, “running out of my room and
out the front door and across the lawn.” He went back to organizing his
research on note cards, this time using some measuring five-inches by
eight-inches in size.
A friend, reading a rough draft of Martin’s story, told him, “If Harper’s
publishes this in anything like its present form, it’ll make your reputation.”
At 18,500 words in rough-draft form, the article was the longest Martin had
ever written. “What made it so long and what made it so powerful was the
relentless documentation—I kept piling it up and piling it up and piling it
up—showing that for years everybody had known the mine was going to blow up but
nobody had stopped it,” Martin recalled.
When Harper’s chief editor
Frederick Lewis Allen read the story, he wrote Martin a long letter praising
the writer’s work and ended by saying, “The whole office is rocking with
cheers.” (Upon its publication Allen tried to have the story nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize, but discovered the journalism award had no magazine category.)
After he had read Martin’s manuscript, artist Shahn had called Russell Lynes,
the editor at Harper’s who
had asked him to provide drawings for the article, at home to tell him he
thought the article was “wonderful.” Lynes added that when “Shahn says
‘wonderful’ it sounds as though he means it. The first syllable takes three
times as long as the other two.”
The artist was so inspired by the tragedy that he produced
sixty-four drawings, saying once he started he felt compelled to keep on
drawing. John D. Voelker, a best-selling author known best today for his novel Anatomy of a Murder,
had met and became friends with Martin during his frequent vacations in the
Upper Peninsula, where Voelker lived. Voelker called the Centralia story “a
glorious piece of plain writing and of social detection and exposure.” He
expressed his amazement at how fair Martin could appear to be, and maybe was,
in the article, but at the same time how he was able to “expose the wound in
all its rawness. You can hit low so fast that even the victim doesn’t know it.”
In his long career as a freelancer, Martin, through his numerous
stories for national magazines and many books, took his readers into the worlds
of such forgotten people as the victims of a gruesome highway crash in
Michigan, the mother of a teenage boy who wondered why her son and two others
killed a nurse for no apparent reason, a convict from Jackson Prison talking
about the hell of life behind bars, a crusading journalist gunned down in cold
blood for daring to expose corruption in his town, a dedicated psychiatrist
trying to save damaged lives at an Ohio mental institution, and an illiterate
black steelworker bringing to life the real meaning of segregated housing in a
northern city.
As the writer of heavy-fact stories, Martin, who died in 1987,
said it was his fate to “thrive on other people’s troubles.” Once a person
involved in the Hollywood film industry asked him, “Don’t you ever write any
happy stories?” Martin told him: “No, I don’t. I don’t think the human lot is a
very happy one. Maybe an analyst could figure that out . . . but I do take my
work seriously and feel dedicated to it.” There existed in Martin’s mind a gulf
between the matter-of-fact newspaperman who saw little difference between
covering a football game and hanging, and the serious journalist he aspired to
be, one who writes significant articles “about serious subjects and takes them
seriously and so becomes himself engaged—engaged in his society, in his times,
in the human condition.”
